Wikipedia:Peer review/Norton Internet Security/archive1

Norton Internet Security

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for December 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I did some extensive cleanup, clarification, and added content. I am interested in how it reads.

Thanks, TechOutsider (talk) 04:47, 23 December 2008 (UTC)TechOutsider

Comments by Uncia (talk · contribs)

What's the purpose of the article, and who is the intended reader? This is not very clear as it stands, as the article is something of a hodge-podge. It consists of a brief history, some techie stuff about how it works, a lot of brief excerpts from lab tests, and finally some screenshots shown with no explanation of their significance.

I suggest that the focus of the article should be changed so it would be useful to someone who has heard about viruses and other dangers of the Internet, wonders what it is all about, and wants to know how NIS fits into the picture. It should not be a product review; that's a job for the computer magazines, and Wikipedia cannot do product reviews because that would be WP:OR. Take a look at some of the Good Articles and Featured Articles in computing and see how that are pitched; for example Mozilla Firefox which is a much more comprehensive article but has a good organization and flow.

Some specific comments:

• The article has a lot of jargon terms that will be unfamiliar to many readers, and these need to be wikilinked (or explained if there's no article); for example: malware, zero-day software, SHA256, firewall, phishing, parental controls, privacy controls, pop-up blocking, ad blocking, "allow/deny" pop-ups, NTFS file system, database, LiveUpdate, honeypot, IP addresses
• It would be useful to mention the other major players in this field, maybe with some comments about market share, or at least wikilinks to their articles if they have one. Since there are free products available, what is Symantec's secret to get people to pay for NIS?
• The "Independent assessments" section is too long - select 3 or 4 of the most useful of these and highlight them in a Critical reception section. You need to give a specific citation for each one you reference.
• The screen shots are not low-resolution as claimed; because they are copyrighted and used under fair-use, they need to be shrunk to just the size needed for the article.
• For references 1 & 2, and the hyperlinks in "Version 2006 and previous", "Version 2008 (15.0)", "Criticisms" please use a full template such as Template:Cite news or Template:Cite web and not just the URL; this is important so that in case the URL changes there will be title and description info to help us find it again.